Junior Member

Senior Member

joined:Jan 28, 2005
posts:3072
votes: 27

@serenoo - what did you do to assist breaking out with a recovery?

- Apologies, that site that held for a week after the EMD update and thru the subsequent Penguin refresh, has actually completely tanked in the last 12 hours. I didn't bother to check until after i wrote the post.

Just goes to show that things can be subject to flux through these updates.

Preferred Member

joined:June 24, 2005
posts: 446
votes: 0

No recovery, despite massive link removal. Checking around around on a couple of other forums and I haven't seen any other recovery except from Spunkle.

Spunkle...it is quite understandable if you don't want to share personal information, but can you provide non-identifiable generalities? It would be so very helpful to us stuck in the dark. We could also be sure that you did recover from Penguin as obviously there are a lot of other penalties out there.

Can you share things like when you got hit, the # of fake links you had, the # you removed, the # you still have, the # of links you obtained (organic or articial) between now and April 24th...?

Senior Member from GB

joined:July 1, 2004
posts: 834
votes: 17

I think that if we are going to get out of this it's going to be when whatever penalty that we have, expires. That's what I hope anyway. And six months would seem to be fitting. That is what I am currently clinging to. I wish I had not wasted what little money I have left workjing on my hit site. I should have just moved on. I might be seeing some results by now.

Preferred Member

joined:Nov 29, 2007
posts:385
votes: 0

And six months would seem to be fitting.

Surely that is a bit of wishful thinking since it is 6 months from the initial drops.

I see two demotions, one where the site is sent into oblivion and the other is a continual weekly bouncing, personally I am going to work on the bouncers as I can see more hope with these and just let the big sinkers expire.

The best result I had was when I registered a brand new domain and transferred the content accross with a new home page.

Senior Member

joined:May 16, 2003
posts:992
votes: 0

There's a lot of talk about link removal, but has Google actually spidered these removals? It can take months for them to get round spidering low-quality pages. For those of you still waiting on a recovery, what's the result when you search for the exact anchor text or surrounding text you used for those low quality links?

Junior Member

joined:Jan 31, 2004
posts:134
votes: 2

For what it's worth - I'm starting to see changes in my analytics and in the SERPs that I have checked which seems to imply that I'm at least out of a penalty situation that I had been in since April 24. This seems to have been just since yesterday. I'm crossing my fingers and holding my breath.

Senior Member from GB

joined:July 1, 2004
posts: 834
votes: 17

My page that had been creeping back up the SERPs entered page one briefly and then back to the top of page 2 and now dropped right off to the top of page 3. Did anyone else see anything over the weekend?

I am pretty much giving up on the site. It's 11 years old - I don't have a hope in hell of cleaning every link it's ever received. Time to call it a day.

Junior Member

Senior Member

joined:Aug 4, 2008
posts:3253
votes: 237

Jez123 When you deleted a lot of backlinks, you site lost a lot of its incoming "pagerank juice". And google has probably devalued the shady backlinks you didn't delete, causing even more incoming "pagerank juice" to be lost. This lost "pagerank juice" had previously helped to boost your site's rankings, so without it your rankings have fallen.

This is why I said in another thread that most likely the only way for a site to make a "full" recovery from Penguin is acquire some new "natural" backlinks to replace the incoming "pagerank juice" that has been lost. I think this will still be true even if Google fixes the Penguin part of its algorithm to remove the penalization aspect of it.

Junior Member

joined:Jan 31, 2004
posts:134
votes: 2

aristotle, I believe that I have recovered from a Penguin penalty - or some other penalty that was imposed on April 24.

I am no longer seeing my site repressed in the SERPs. My site is long-tail, so people searching for pages on my site's subject should get my site on the first page when there is no other competition. From April 24 to Oct 17 that was not the case - my site often appeared at the #11 position, which was a clear sign of a penalty to me.

Starting on April 18, when I search for the phrases that I've seen repressed, they are now showing up in the #1 or #2 spot.

I made a lot of changes since April 24 - but because my backlinks were all legit, I did not focus on backlink removal, with the exception of a small handful of sites which had linked me blogroll style to their message forums so it showed 400,000 links on their site to one on my site. That seemed really egregious, so I asked those sites to remove the links. A couple did, but they did it months ago, so it didn't coincide with Oct 18.

I suspect that the penalty might be time-based, and could be due to something else I did, or maybe just due to an increase in seasonal traffic that my site gets from October to April - maybe the increase in traffic pushed me above some threshold that Google uses.

Senior Member from GB

joined:July 1, 2004
posts: 834
votes: 17

Hi Ralph_ I have tried to remove links with direct anchor text whether they look natural or not. I just emailed another site that had a lot of links to me - I never asked them for them but that doesn't mean they will look natural to google. How do you know what google thinks in natural or not? This is my dilemma.

Senior Member

joined:Aug 4, 2008
posts:3253
votes: 237

for the reasons I've already given, I still don't think that anyone can make a "full" recovery from penguin just by getting backlinks removed and doing nothing else. And I haven't seen any reports of clearcut examples that would prove otherwise.

Senior Member from GB

Senior Member

joined:Aug 4, 2008
posts:3253
votes: 237

No but there are no clearcut examples of anyone doing anything else that worked either.

Are you suggesting that there's no way for a site to recover?

Actually, it may very well not make any difference whether you remove any backlinks or not, since Google probably devalues them anyway. But in either case, I don't see how a site can ever make a "full" recovery unless it acquires some new "natural" backlinks to replace those that are removed or devalued.

Junior Member

joined:Aug 31, 2009
posts: 91
votes: 0

I changed the domain sometime in the first week of August when nothing seemed to work. I didn't do a redirect from the old one. But the search traffic took a leap on Oct 7 just like it took a dip in the last week of April 2012. I'm still not willing to do a 301 from the old domain cause it may be too early to tell. But I'm surprised if this was Penguin, because I changed the domain (but the organic search graph still took a leap just like it took a dip in Apr).

Preferred Member

joined:Jan 3, 2006
posts: 612
votes: 0

I said a while back that there is no recovery but was said to repress discussion about recoveries, but like most here I haven't seen anybody posting about recovering. I still think that what we have now is what we have to live with, except for us with a double whammy of a -950 penalty where we might be able to recover from.

Senior Member from GB

joined:July 1, 2004
posts: 834
votes: 17

Are you suggesting that there's no way for a site to recover?

No, just that we are not seeing any. Cutts did say that it would be possible to recover - if you believe him. It certainly does not seem that there is a way to "recover" but maybe the penalty gets lifted one day. I spent way too much time effort and money trying to pull my site out of this - I would have been better to ditch it and start again and that's pretty much what I am doing now. Except I don't really have the budget after spending it all on trying to bring my old one back from the dead.

I do think that recoveries will happen one day as there are too many false positives involved. Plus, it's not really clear what google likes or dislikes now so removing links is dangerous, as is keeping them as you will never know what google does or doesn't like. So I hope they take some pity on us.

Junior Member

joined:Aug 31, 2009
posts: 91
votes: 0

I also believe that sites will be penalised in the beginning of the year and there will always be recoveries (just less ppl to crib about recoveries); and recoveries will happen before christmas. (Only to be penalised again). Makes sense for Mr. G.

Junior Member

Jez, I wish I could tell you the specific thing I did that worked. Here is what I did since April 24:

* Blocked Google from my development server which was being indexed. Also redirected my non-WWW pages to WWW (widget.com, mail.widget.com, ftp.widget.com were all showing up as valid URLs).

* Asked 4-5 sites to remove blogroll backlinks. These backlinks were appearing in WMT as a huge amount of links to a very small number of pages, mostly my homepage. 3 of them removed them.

* Corrected a lot of issues with duplicate titles and meta descriptions as show in WMT.

* Fixed a situation where a calendar-like page was generating thousands of nonsense pages which Google had been spidering.

* Changed the link structure on a widget I have to be nofollow. This widget shows on other sites.

* Made site navigation better by adding breadcrumb trails.

* Added rich snippets to some pages.

* removed some advertising from each page, mostly a single-unit Adsense ad, a 125x150 banner that I sold myself, and with some thinner pages, a 300x250 ad unit (though this unit still appears on most other pages).

* Updated my vBulletin installation so that nofollow is added to all external links, and cleaned up some forum spam there (I had been actively trying to do this, but the spammers found crevices that I didn't even know existed).

* Nofollowed my "links" page - just about a dozen links on it though, and none were paid or traded for.

* No-indexed a lot of pages that either had no information on them, were search results (and thus not useful to the SERPs) or were infrastructure-type pages (also not useful to the index).

* Added more content to the site, as I have done for the past 16 years. I focused a bit more on rounding out existing topics than on adding new topics, but not enough to make a difference, in my opinion.

Yes, a lot of the changes were Panda-related, but I hadn't been hit with Panda before, at least not noticeably - although a problem I specifically noticed last October, with certain pages not being returned, appears to be resolved too, so perhaps there is some Panda/Penguin interplay involved here - maybe Penguin just makes your site more susceptible to Panda?

Here is why I think I have recovered: Prior to April, in WMT, it showed about 600k search impressions. In April, the impressions got screwy, changing nearly every day, going as high as 1m impressions. Then, April 24, they dropped to about 200k impressions. Throughout the summer they were around 100k impressions. Now, Oct 18, they went up to 450k impressions.

As I mentioned, my site is seasonal, and my traffic is also being hit due to a labor-related issue in my niche which is causing less interest in the topic, but I have tracked my site's statistics religiously for the past 13 years and from April 24 to Oct 18, there was clearly a penalty in effect - and my experimentation with SERPs showed it as well.